Cognitive mappers to creatures of habit: differential engagement of place and response learning mechanisms predicts human navigational behavior
Open accessAbstract
Learning to navigate plays an integral role in the survival of humans and other animals. Research on human navigation has largely focused on how we deliberately map out our world. However, many of us also have experiences of navigating on “autopilot” or out of habit. Animal models have identified this cognitive mapping versus habit learning as two dissociable systems for learning a space—a hippocampal place-learning system and a striatal response-learning system. Here, we use this dichotomy in humans to understand variability in navigational style by demonstrating that brain activation during spatial encoding can predict where a person's behavior falls on a continuum from a more flexible cognitive map-like strategy to a more rigid creature-of-habit approach. These findings bridge the wealth of knowledge gained from animal models and the study of human behavior, opening the door to a more comprehensive understanding of variability in human spatial learning and navigation.
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In the dual-solutions paradigm, the tendency to use shortcuts is thought to indicate the use of survey knowledge by the individual.
“In DSP the tendency to use shortcuts is thought to indicate the use of survey knowledge by the individual, and it has been used in both rodent and human studies.”
From A Role of Environmental Complexity on Representation Learning in Deep Reinforcement Learning Agents (2024) · cites this paper as [12]
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- Authors
- Marchette, S. A., Bakker, A., & Shelton, A. L.
- Affiliations
- Johns Hopkins University (US)
- Corresponding author
- Shelton, Amy L.
- Venue
- The Journal of Neuroscience
- Publisher
- Society for Neuroscience
- Published
- 2011-10-26
- Volume
- 31
- Issue
- 43
- Pages
- 15264-15268
- ISSN
- 0270-6474 (ISSN-L)
- 1529-2401
- PMC
- PMC4826051
- OpenAlex
- W1979223761
- Cited by
- 162
- References
- 3
- Citations by year
- 2026: 8 · 2025: 17 · 2024: 10 · 2023: 15 · 2022: 21 · 2021: 13 · 2020: 11 · 2019: 12 · 2018: 12 · 2017: 8 · 2016: 9 · 2015: 5 · 2014: 9 · 2013: 6 · 2012: 5
- FWCI
- 13.10
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- hybrid
- doi.org
- Licence
- Locations
- Journal of Neuroscience (publishedVersion, cc-by-nc-sa)
- Europe PMC (PubMed Central) (publishedVersion)
- PubMed Central (publishedVersion)
- PubMed (publishedVersion)
- Funders
- National Institute on Aging (T32AG027668)
- Topics
- Physical Sciences › Engineering › Automotive Engineering › Spatial Cognition and Navigation
- Life Sciences › Neuroscience › Cognitive Neuroscience › Memory and Neural Mechanisms
- Social Sciences › Geography, Planning and Development › Geography Education and Pedagogy
- Keywords
- human navigation, cognitive maps, habit learning, place learning, response learning, hippocampus, striatum, spatial coding, individual differences, spatial learning, brain activation
- MeSH terms
- Adolescent, Brain, Brain Mapping, Cognition, Female, Humans, Image Processing, Computer-Assisted, Individuality, Magnetic Resonance Imaging, Male, Oxygen, Space Perception, Statistics as Topic, User-Computer Interface, Maze Learning, Young Adult
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